


Her Second Voice

by Duckface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 02:58:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1841749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duckface/pseuds/Duckface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Turns out Vriska and Sollux were hell of doing it, for a while.  It didn't help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Second Voice

He never knew why she told him – what she was hoping to gain.

She messaged him after Aradia’s accident with a studied nonchalance that made him laugh. They never talked about it, about any of their friends, any of what happened. Mostly they talked about video games. She was so careful never to be nice to him that he found it soothing, something to rely on in a world of explosive reversals. No matter what else was happening, Vriska could be counted upon to be herself, to flutter up to the edge of intimacy and then laugh at the joke she had made of their friendship.

Friendship was stretching it. He knew, in a vague way, that she had been responsible for a lot of the bad things that had happened recently, and that people were angry at her. That was OK. People were angry a lot, and she was funny about it, which helped.

Also, he was rebounding, and so one night during a particularly overwhelming bout of mania he asked if she wanted to hang out, like, in person. She laughed in his face but never got around to saying no, and the next time she messaged him she talked about it like it was something she had decided, like it was a burden she was going to bear for him. She told him this was not something for public consumption, that if he ever told anybody they were friends she would have to kill him, purely for the sake of her reputation. She already had one loser following her around, she said. She didn’t need anyone thinking she was some kind of charity.

They met on a hillside, far away from anyone they knew, under a full green moon. They didn’t talk for a long time – just stood there, each unwilling to express a single iota of satisfaction or happiness or surprise or disappointment. Then they talked about video games.

Hair grown long for years, brushed to the tailbone, is one of nature’s warning signs, a splash of red on a poisonous frog. A challenge, a promise. It made his eyes cross a little. She hunched inside the army jacket she always wore, perfectly caught inside herself, and the first time he tried to touch her she hit him in the face very hard. He got the impression that she had learned how romance was supposed to work from comic books.

He played his part and sputtered in mock outrage and goofed around the ever-present violence because he wanted to touch her again, a lot. Eventually, she let him, grumbling about perverts and what she put up with to keep certain idiots happy. She stayed stiff as a board and kept her clothes on and didn’t seem to understand the point of what he was doing.

It wasn’t fun.

He would have given up, but at some point, and he could never remember when, she told him about the second voice.

He had been talking about the voices of the doomed that always rattled in his brain, working up to an excuse for why he couldn’t see her that night. She tried to one-up him, of course.

Sometimes it seemed to be the voice of her ancestor, and sometimes the voice of her mother, an arachnid sibilance in the back of her head. Whatever it was, it was present, and palpable, and overwhelmingly _consistent_. When she was talking, when she was trying to sleep, when she was reading or playing or in the shower, there was always a running commentary, a breathless and unending monologue of critical observation tearing everything apart. The words she said - her face in the mirror. Her friends, her friendships, her work. The voice said that everything was stupid, dumb and tiny, petty and ridiculous, unlovely and unworthy of love, and she knew the voice was right, because it was also prophetic. Everything it shat on turned out, eventually and inevitably, to be shit.

It was talking to her right now, picking apart every little word she said about it. It was impossible to be in the moment, to enjoy anything fully, because it made everything seem shitty and fake. That was why she liked playing games, she said – at least they were _supposed_ to be stupid and fake, and she could use them to… kind of… sneak up on reality? It was a place where she could be absolutely, _quantifiably_ perfect, and that was enough to shut the voice up, at least for a while.

This gave Sollux an idea.

\--

Later, in down moments, he would treasure this exchange, representing as it did a defining piece of evidence against him, proof positive that he was a shitty person. What kind of insensitive predatory sociopath hears a story like that and decides it’s a great moment to whip out his dick?

A teenage boy, he guessed. That particular kind of sociopath.

All he needed to do was to frame sex as a game, and specifically as a game she was bad at. Something to gain levels in.

First off, she told him that she was great at sex, that _he_ was the one who was bad at sex. He reminded her that he was the only one of them who ever got laid – that even mind control couldn’t get her any. She said that even if she accepted his premise – which she didn’t – there was no way she was ever going to be able to get any practice, because her second voice would never let her relax long enough to be bad at something that stupid. He asked her if she ever touched herself. She made him punch himself in the face.

He said – what if you didn’t have a choice? Would your voice shut up then? What if the captain of a rival ship came, killed your crew, and had his way with you – you know, of course, before you escaped, and made him pay? What if you were working as a spy and got double-crossed, captured, but refused to give anything up, even under torture? What if I tied you up and took off all your clothes?

He realized later that he must have been the last of the group willing to spend time with her at that point, certainly the last one she felt that she could trust. It was the only explanation he could think of – that, or the fact that someone finally wanted to _play pretend_ with her again, going into it eyes open, someone who wasn’t going to end up spider food. He felt – he hoped – that there was at least a little bit of curiosity there, too, about what they could do together, and what it would be like.

Either way, she signed off without saying no, and that was that.

\--

She would never let him tie her down in a way she couldn’t escape without help, would never let him use his mind to restrain her, would never let him hurt her except in the specific and limited ways she wanted to be hurt. There were rules, and there were rules about the rules – what could be said, and when, and what _needed_ to be. She would laugh at him when he fucked up a knot, when he took too long, when he didn’t take long enough. Blindfolded, trembling and ‘vulnerable’ one moment, fidgety with boredom and scorn the next. And she never came, not once.

It was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

It was like somebody had thrown a switch in the back of her brain. As soon as it wasn’t _her_ on stage anymore, _her_ in her body, but some made up pirate or hero or rogue (or, on one semi-successful occasion, dental hygienist), she was able to be enthusiastic, demanding, even voracious. He built things for her, new furniture, new restraints, better and weirder and more elaborate toys, and she took all of it on, laughing and writhing and screaming and never thanking him once. Hunting for her orgasm became a kind of war of attrition - she refused to let that final piece go, to be truly vulnerable in front of him, and this sparked an arms race of vibrators and buttplugs and floggers and clamps that consumed an alarming amount of his time.

On a few occasions, against sanity and better judgment, he asked her if she’d like to be in charge. (He was a switch, of course, to his very core.) She tried it, and it bored her. Her technique of choice was to wrap him like a mummy from head to foot, sit on him and pretend that he wasn’t there, which while enjoyable on an intellectual level was not what he’d had in mind.

He figured it out eventually. To be naked, spread-eagled, and blind, shackled into a device built specifically for her, the absolute focus of every ounce of his wanting – it all boiled down to one thing, for her. It was all about being, in the most fundamental and animal way, the center of attention.

\--

He found out what happened to Aradia eventually, of course. He didn’t speak to Vriska much after that. He moved on as quickly and as completely as he could.

Still, there was a part of him that never stopped thinking about her. She was the best lay he had ever had, a fact which was as infuriating as it was undeniable. After her, the guileless enthusiasm of his new partners left him feeling weird and cheap. It was stupid to miss someone he hadn’t even loved; they had been fuckbuddies, full stop, and he was pretty sure that Vriska wasn’t capable of sustaining a real relationship in any quadrant, that it would require stepping too far outside of herself, caring about something other than how wonderful/terrible she was. There was a part of him that didn’t care. Some nights he was ready to fuck up everything in his life just to have her back. Why not, when everything was definitely fucked up anyway?

Things got a little hectic, shortly thereafter, and by the time he had the chance to think about it again, she was dead.

Much later – back with Aradia, who upon resurrection had become an unstoppable, eerily grinning power top – he found himself wondering whether it was possible to fuck a ghost.


End file.
